Live in Zagreb

In 2001-2002, Voiceprint released a series of official bootlegs on Cog Sinister, its imprint devoted to the group the Fall. There are hits and misses, and Live in Zagreb belongs in the second category. Granted, the performance is good and nicely recorded (direct from the mixing desk, it seems), but everything else runs against this album. First of all, fans have strongly disputed the fact that this concert was recorded in Zagreb at all. It probably comes from the 1990 German tour immediately following the release of Extricate. From that album, the group performs "Sing Harpy," "I'm Frank," "Bill Is Dead," "Hilary," "Black Monk Theme," "Telephone Thing," "And Therein," and "Popcorn Double Feature" — all but a couple tracks of Extricate translate into eight of the 12 tracks on the 42-minute Live in Zagreb. Of course, the songs sound a bit dirtier on-stage, but differences are not important enough to make this CD interesting to any but die-hard collectors or those who don't own the studio album yet. The remaining four tracks consist of an instrumental ("Zagreb") and songs from the 1988 album The Frenz Experiment (the track identified as "Tuff Life Boogie" turns out to be "Deadbeat Descendant"). The cover design is crude (to be polite) and information is kept to a bare minimum. It's a good performance, with "Carry Bag Man," "Hit the North," and "I'm Frank" hitting nice peaks, but there are much better live documents than this, both musically and historically. ~ François Couture, Rovi